As part of an upcoming “Chronicle” show, I paid a visit recently to the famed fifth-floor Boston City Hall office of the Hub’s longest-serving mayor. The office looks the same as it has for years. The man who works in it, however, does not.

The change is, frankly, startling.

“Morning,” a hale if somewhat soft voice called from the private elevator doorway.

Tom Menino ambles slowly into the room, clutching a black cane, looking noticeably weaker, rather gaunt, his hair now snow white. The mayor’s many and varied health issues over the past ten years or so have clearly taken their toll. An unprecedented five terms has clearly been enough.

“He’s only six or so years older than me; I used to see him and see sort of an ‘older brother,’” observes former Boston City Councilor Larry DiCara. “Then I saw him recently after not seeing him for a bit—and I saw my grandfather.”

The physical change aside, it’s also clear that the essential Menino manner is still very much intact: the playfulness, the wry asides muttered under his breath, the joking, and the ever-keen and dead-on political observations.

On this morning, the mayor could afford to be a bit more expansive as we sit and talked.

After all, for the first time in two decades, the frenzied mayoral campaign going on outside did not involve him.

“Do you miss it?” I wondered.

“Oh, sure,” he smiles. And he makes clear he has been paying close attention to the race, too.

“Sometimes I see some of their answers and I say, ‘What?? How stupid is that idea? Where did they come up with that idea?’ Yeah, I miss that part of it. I don’t miss the debates.”

Not surprising, really. Tom Menino was many things as mayor. Quick and articulate on his feet was not one of them.

I ask him if it ever bothered him—all the jokes, nicknames and worse—regarding his battles with public speaking the English language.

"I know I wasn’t a fancy-talker—I never told the people of Boston I was. That’s who I am, nobody can make me over.”

“I think he knew it as the weakness it was,” says Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi, who wrote dozens of columns about the mayor over the years. “But he still turned it into as much of a strength as he could, and I think people respected him for that.”

“I grew up in the neighborhoods of Boston,” Menino says, staring out the window towards the water. “I still livein the neighborhoods, I’ll always stay there; it’s in my gut.”

Indeed, as he has for twenty years, Boston’s Chief Executive returns each night to the small, simple ranch house on Chesterfield Street, in the tiny Readville section of Hyde Park. And few facts about the mayor are more telling. He never got too big for the job and, as importantly, never wanted another job.

“He loved being mayor and I think that really helped him to be the mayor that he was because he wasn’t positioning,” says Vennochi. “He was smart, he was politically smart—he made the most of the job that he had.”

Nor did this son of one of the city’s most humble neighborhoods ever lose his everyman touch with his everyday neighbors—the citizens of Boston.

“What you see is what you get,” smiles former state rep Jim Brett from Dorchester, who lost to Menino in the 1993 mayor final election. “He has this ability to be sitting with presidents or prime-ministers who come to visit the city, but then at night he’ll end up the day at the Boys and Girls Club in Dorchester or West Roxbury, and you go, ‘He hasn’t forgotten….’”

Nor will Bostonians soon forget Tom Menino.

Not all of it was good. He could be petty, mean-spirited, and could hang on to a grudge longer than a hungry dog with a big, meaty bone. (And seemed to relish it just as much, too.)

“There was a ‘Good List’ and a ‘Naught List,’” smiles Vennochi. “No one wanted to get on the naughty list because they knew nothing good would come of it.”

True enough. And more than a few otherwise hard-charging and successful Boston businessmen and developers knew the political purgatory of ending up on the mayor’s “naughty list.”

But others, particularly the city’s children, knew what it was like to have the city’s most powerful person pat you on the head, offer you encouragement, and ask you how school was going. Kids at Menino’s beloved Camp Harborview knew what it was like to have the mayor appear suddenly on a sunny afternoon and join in your volleyball game, or sit at your picnic table at lunchtime, tray in front of him just like you, and ask about your day.

Boston’s minorities knew what it was like to have the strongest advocate they’ve ever had at city hall. When it came to a passionate belief in fairness, respect, and inclusion, Menino walked the walk. Early on, when the organizers of the famed South Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade banned gay groups from marching, Menino broke with longstanding mayoral tradition and refused to participate. No small thing when slighting the most politically potent neighborhood in the city.

“That was an act of extraordinary courage,” says DiCara. “And Tom was way ahead of the curve on that.”

“I did what I supposed to do,” says Menino quietly. “I did that for the right reason, not the political reason, that’s what’s so key.”

As he looks at the city outside his window, Menino is rightly proud of its growth over past twenty years. its expansive development both downtown and in the neighborhoods. Boston’s oft-maligned public schools are showing signs of progress; the city boasts more jobs than ever before. Most importantly, Menino makes clear, it is today a more diverse, more inclusive—and more tolerant—city.

“We don’t hear national stories about Boston being a racist city, anymore; that’s very important to me.”

Outside his office window, Menino can look down and see statues of two of his most famous predecessors, former mayors James Michael Curley, and Kevin H. White. And someday, somewhere in the city, there will almost certainly be a statue of Thomas M. Menino. But the bronze, bigger-than-life likeness will not be able to convey what has made the flesh-and-blood man such a colorfully complex character. But the city that will surround that statue, is better because of him.

“I just hope I left this city in better shape,” Menino says as we wrap up our chat. “I just hope when I walk out this door, people will say, ‘Gee, he helped us, make this a better city…’”

(Follow Ted on Twitter. Watch “Mayor Pothole,” a look back at Menino’s legacy, on “Chronicle,” Oct. 2, at 7:30.)